The questions worth asking, including the awkward ones.

Answered as they actually are today, not as they will be once even has run enough briefs to know more. Where the honest answer is that something is not solved yet, that is what it says.

How do you know the creatives are any good?

Right now, for someone who has not yet done a brief here, even does not know. No platform does. Before anyone has completed a job, every signal available at signup is either something they said about themselves, which cannot be checked, or something trivial to fake, like uploading a few images. A skill rating typed in by the person being rated is not evidence, and putting a number on it would make it look like one.

So even does not show you a score it cannot stand behind. The shortlist is decided by whose turn it is, and the fields for style match and past quality sit at weight 0 and 0 in the code because there is no data behind them yet. When there is, they will start counting, and this answer will change.

What protects you in the meantime is not a rating. It is that you see finished work before you pay for any of it, and that if none of it is good enough you commission nobody and the project fee comes back to you.

If you are hiring

What if I do not like any of the work?: You commission nobody. The project fee, the large part, comes back to you in full. The attempt fees stay with the people who turned work in, because they did the work you asked for. You are never made to choose a piece you cannot use in order to get your money back.
Why can I not pick who works on my brief?: Because picking first is the thing that goes wrong everywhere else. You would be choosing from what people say about themselves, before any of them has made you anything. Invitations go out in turn instead, and you choose at the end, from finished work.
What stops someone turning in rubbish to collect the attempt fee?: Nothing stops one person trying it once. What stops it being a strategy is that they do not choose their briefs, so they cannot pick easy ones, and their work sits next to four other people’s on the same brief where the difference is obvious. They also never get the project fee, which is the part worth having.
Is this a design contest?: No, and the difference is the money. In a contest one person is paid and everyone else works for nothing. Here every attempt turned in is paid, win or not. That is the whole reason a creative with paying clients would spend a day on your brief.

If you do the work

Can a business take my work and refuse to pay?: No. Turning in real work earns the attempt fee on its own, and there is no control anywhere in the product that lets a business mark an attempt unpaid. The only choice they make is which single piece to commission.
How do I get invited more often?: By waiting your turn, which is the only ranking signal running today. Being shortlisted moves you to the back of the queue, so the same names cannot take every brief. Nothing you write on your profile moves you up, and nothing you pay moves you up either.
What if I am new here?: You are in the queue on the same terms as everyone else, because there is nothing else to go on yet. Over a run of briefs that is the fairest arrangement available: everybody comes up, and everybody who turns work in is paid for it.
What if I take a seat and cannot finish?: Pass it, and the seat goes to the next person straight away. Nothing is held against you. You have 24 hours to accept a seat and about 14 days to turn work in once you do, and a seat you let go quiet is simply offered on.

About Even itself

How does Even make money?: One cut, in one place: 15% of the project fee, taken only from the piece that gets commissioned. even takes nothing from the attempt fee, and there is no subscription, no fee to hold an account and no fee to sit in the queue.
How new is this?: New. There are no completed briefs to quote figures from, which is why you will not find an average earnings number or a time to delivery anywhere on this site. Every figure here is either arithmetic from the fee table or a published number about another platform, with the source linked.
Who is behind it?: One person. I am Jay Digital, an independent multidisciplinary digital artist, and I built even because I have been on the losing side of both problems it is trying to fix: writing pitches nobody reads, and paying for work that turned out wrong.
What is not built yet?: A measured record of how a creative’s work has actually fared, which is the thing that would let even tell you more than whose turn it is. It needs completed briefs to exist before it can mean anything, so it is not switched on and not claimed.

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What It Costs

The fee table, worked arithmetic for a real brief, and exactly what comes back to you.